Health & Wellness

Report: Nearly half of abortions worldwide are not safe

Abortion remains divisive in the U.S. — where these protesters gathered in 2015 for the annual March on Life in Washington, D.C.

Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press/TNS

More than 25 million unsafe abortions, or 45 percent of all abortions, were performed worldwide each year from 2010 to 2014, according to a new analysis by the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization.

"Increased efforts are needed, especially in developing countries, to ensure access to safe abortions," concluded the authors, led by WHO physician Bela Ganatra, a reproductive-health expert.

The report, published in the Lancet, updates a 2012 overview, when the researchers estimated that there were 43.8 million abortions worldwide, half of them unsafe.

The new analysis distinguished, for the first time, among three categories of abortion: safe, meaning a trained provider used a method recommended by WHO; less-safe, meaning either the provider was untrained or the method was outdated; and least-safe, meaning an untrained provider used dangerous methods. Those methods included inserting a foreign body such as a twig or coat hanger into the uterus, or having the patient drink caustic concoctions.

In developed countries, nearly 88 percent of abortions were safe — meaning less-safe abortions also occurred in these nations, primarily in Eastern Europe. In North America, an estimated 1 percent of abortions were less safe.

Although the analysis did not directly estimate the number of abortion-related deaths, it did calculate by region the proportion of maternal deaths that were due to abortion. Western and Middle Africa had the worst rates, with more than 400 deaths per 100,000 abortions.